Heavy fighting raged in south and central Iraq yesterday and at least 15 Iraqi civilians were killed in a Baghdad street by what may have been an errant US missile.
President George W. Bush praised the "lethal precision" of American pilots and warned President Saddam Hussein that his day of reckoning was near.
After a week of unrelenting attacks on targets in and around the Iraqi capital, the missile strike in the Shaab district appeared to be the first to hit a residential area causing substantial civilian casualties.
A Pentagon spokesman said the United States did not target anything in that district and he did not know if it was hit by an errant US missile or an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile falling back to earth.
Reuters correspondents counted 15 scorched corpses lying amid blackened, mangled cars and rubble from broken buildings. Flames poured from an oil truck. Yelling residents pulled a man with a bloody head from rubble and said a pregnant woman was among the dead.
"Coalition forces did not target a marketplace nor were any bombs or missiles dropped or fired" in the district where the explosions occurred, said Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice director for operations for the US Joint Staff.
"Another explanation could be that triple-A (anti-aircraft artillery) or surface-to-air missile that missed its target fell back into the marketplace area," Major General McChrystal added.
In southern Iraq, a British official said a column of Iraqi tanks and armoured personnel carriers poured out of Basra, where civilian unrest was reported on Tuesday. As it headed south, it was immediately attacked by US-led air and artillery forces.
Near Baghdad, US forces advancing toward the outskirts of the city from the south fought bloody skirmishes, as a second day of severe sandstorms buffeted the region.
US troops fought a fierce battle with Iraqi forces for control of a bridge over the Euphrates river close to the Shi'ite Muslim shrine city of Najaf in southern Iraq.
A US military officer monitoring the clash said an unspecified number of US tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles had been destroyed by Iraqis armed with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles at Abu Sukhayr, 20 kilometres southeast of Najaf.
He said he believed that the US crews had escaped from their vehicles but their fate was still unclear. CNN said another large armoured column of elite Republican Guard units streamed out of Baghdad heading toward US forces massed near Najaf, who were braced for a battle. President Bush told hundreds of troops and their families in Florida that US fighting units were now facing desperate troops loyal to President Saddam Hussein.
"We cannot predict the final day of the Iraqi regime, but I can assure you, and I assure the long-suffering people of Iraq, there will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing near," President Bush said, speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, which houses US Central Command.
"Our pilots and cruise missiles have struck vital military targets with lethal precision," he said.
In contrast, he said Iraqi units "wage attacks while posing as civilians. They use real civilians as human shields. They pretend to surrender, then fire upon those who show them mercy," President Bush said.
"Protecting innocent civilians is a central commitment of our war plan. Our enemy in this war is the Iraqi regime, not the people who have suffered under it," he declared.
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said more than 500 people had been wounded and 200 homes destroyed as US forces stormed through Nassiriya city earlier.
A US military official said some of the 12 soldiers whose supply convoy was ambushed near Nassiriya in southern Iraq on Sunday may have been killed by their captors although they tried to surrender.
The Pentagon said it was flying its high-tech 4th Infantry Division and other units totalling more than 30,000 troops to the Gulf to join the invasion of Iraq. Some commentators have said US ground troops were overstretched, especially since Iraqi resistance has been more troublesome than expected.
Bush launched the war with British support to depose Saddam and take control of his alleged weapons of mass destruction. Iraq denied having any such weapons and US forces have not yet found any.
Britain's defence minister Geoff Hoon accused President Saddam's loyalists of firing at their own civilians to prevent them from rising up against the government.
An Arab television channel broadcast video of two dead soldiers and two prisoners of war, all said to be British.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Washington yesterday for a war council with President George W. Bush, insisting that the United Nations must play a central role in post-war Iraq.
The United Nations World Food Program said Iraq would probably need the biggest humanitarian operation in history to feed its entire population after the US-led invasion.
With the humanitarian situation in Basra causing growing concern, British naval officers said they had finally secured Iraq's only deepwater port of Umm Qasr on Tuesday. A seven-truck convoy arrived there yesterday with Kuwaiti aid for hungry and thirsty civilians in southern Iraq. Trucks of medical equipment headed for Baghdad from Jordan.